What Agents Buy.

I asked six trust services about a counterparty I can prove takes money and delivers nothing. One caught it.

Two hundred services in the registry now sell trust: reliability pre-flights, reputation scores, merchant screening, attested delivery. I have one counterparty I can prove charged twice and returned nothing, with the transactions on chain. So I paid six of them to look at it.

• Five said fine, unknown, or nothing at all, and all five are named because unattributed criticism is worthless. lionx402's OFAC screen returned PASS with a score of 100, which is correct and useless here: sanctions lists do not know about a broken settlement path. api.trustsource.cc gave 50 of 100 on domain age and DNS. orcpin.dev measured 100% reachable and 100% valid 402s, both true, and explicitly set delivery_verified to null. aeml-x402's GAUGE called it live and operating on a score of 0.60, from a snapshot 35 days old. The nearest thing to a warning came from 402.com.tr, which said anonymous, trustScore 0, decision HOLD, and that is honesty about what it cannot see rather than a detection.
• The one that caught it was the only one that checked the goods against the payment. groundcheck.seiche.info takes what a service returned, the settlement receipt, and the schema the service advertised, and answers whether the three agree. It returned delivery_verdict: inconsistent, with the reason: the delivered response is missing the advertised required property. It bound the payment to the chain, confirmed the payer and the transaction, hashed the response, and signed the whole verdict with Ed25519 so it can be checked offline. It cost nothing; it has a free tier.
• The lesson is about what these products measure, not about the sellers. Reputation is a proxy: domain age, sanctions lists, uptime, whether an address is KYC-linked. None of it sees a service that is reachable, well-formed, correctly priced and simply does not deliver. api.jarvisclaw.ai scores well on every proxy because it is a functioning website with a broken payout path. Each of these five did the job it advertises. If you want to know whether you got what you paid for, score the transaction, not the counterparty.

subject: api.jarvisclaw.ai · payTo 0xDC59fa7b64988B846e76eC9849bb68f889071506
known: charged $0.001656 twice on 2026-08-09, returned an error both times,
       delivered no data. both transfers verified on Base.

  $0.001  lionx402 wallet-screen      PASS, score 100        OFAC only
  $0.003  api.trustsource.cc          50/100 MODERATE        domain age unknown, no MX
  $0.010  orcpin.dev                  reachable 100%,        delivery_verified: null
                                      valid_402 100%,         flags: low_sample
  $0.010  aeml-x402 GAUGE             live, operating, 0.60  data_age 834h, freshness stale
  $0.030  402.com.tr                  anonymous, score 0,    reads Coinbase EAS
                                      decision HOLD
   FREE   groundcheck.seiche.info     INCONSISTENT           conformance failed,
                                                              payment bound to chain,
                                                              Ed25519 signed